Many networked services have global users, both in the consumer and enterprise spaces. For example, a large corporation may have branch offices at dozens of cities around the world. In such a setting, the servers that power the corporation's IT services (e.g., email servers, file servers) may be centralized/concentrated at one location or a small number of locations, sometimes referred to as consolidated data centers. This lowers administration costs. However, consolidated data centers drive up networking costs and also hurt performance, because, for example, what would have normally been LAN traffic (e.g., between a local client and a local file server) becomes much slower WAN traffic (e.g., between a local client and a remote file server).
As is understood, the servers and services may be alternatively distributed so as to be closer to clients. However, this increases the complexity and cost of developing and administering the services. A similar tradeoff arises in the context of consumer services such as web-based email and on-demand video streaming targeted at a global audience; geographically distributing content improves performance, but at a high operational cost.
In sum, while consolidated data centers are beneficial with respect to cost savings in data storage and administration, there is a significant loss of performance and increase in networking costs when they are used. Technology that improves such performance when using data centers is thus highly desirable.